The Oyster Creek nuclear plant in Lacey will cease all operations to generate electricity on Sept. 17. The plant started in 1969, making it the longest-running of all U.S. commercial reactors.

Much discussion has focused on the economic impact of the closure, with little or no attention paid to the health effects of exposure to radioactivity produced by the reactor.

Oyster Creek has 400 workers, down from 900 at one time. Plant operator Exelon has reduced jobs over time by hiring “floaters,” each of whom provide a specific service at multiple Exelon plants, all in the name of cost-cutting.

Of the 400 remaining workers, about 100 have reportedly agreed to take a buyout or accepted another job within Exelon. The decommissioning and clean-up of Oyster Creek after shutdown will require up to 300 workers, the exact number depending on the proposed sale of the plant.

Jeff Tittel, chapter director the New Jersey Sierra Club talks about his concerns about Oyster Creek, the plant's decommission, and what radioactive waste on the site could mean for the future, at the New Jersey Sierra Club office in Trenton, NJ Tuesday January 17, 2017. Tanya Breen

Lacey Township resident Regina Discenza is shown during a Thursday afternoon, May 11, 2017, interview in the township. She expressed concern about the town’s tax rate when the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant (shown in the background) closes. Thomas P. Costello

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A far greater concern than job loss from the shutdown is the damage to human health from exposure to huge amounts of poisonous chemicals over the past half century, just to provide 6 percent of New Jersey’s electricity.

Like all reactors, Oyster Creek generates more than 100 radioactive chemicals not found in nature, but only produced in nuclear plants and weapons. These chemicals include Strontium-90, Iodine-131 and Cesium-137. They threaten the health of local residents in several ways:

• Meltdowns. The worst-case scenario at Oyster Creek would be a catastrophic meltdown (like Chernobyl and Fukushima), in which water required to cool the extremely hot reactor core is lost. After Sept. 17, most of the radioactivity in Oyster Creek’s core will disappear in a short period, and the remainder stored as waste. While no meltdown ever occurred at the plant, a 2006 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists identified several “near miss” events.

• Waste. The enormous amount of radioactive waste must be stored, first in deep pools of cooled water within the reactor and later in concrete-and-steel casks now being placed outside the plant. The amount of this waste is estimated at 345 million curies, or more than double that released from the Chernobyl meltdown. The radioactivity in the waste decays very slowly. Some of it will not disappear for hundreds of years, and some not for 240,000 years. With no permanent storage plan, government regulators now instruct nuclear plant operators to keep the waste at plants for the foreseeable future.

• Routine Releases. Any reactor must release a portion of its radioactive chemicals into the local air and water. It enters human bodies through food, water and breathing. Federal reports found that in the 1970s alone, Oyster Creek had the largest total releases of any U.S. reactor — far more than the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island. A study found that one chemical, Strontium-90, entered baby teeth near six nuclear plants (including Oyster Creek) at levels 30 to 50 percent above areas far from plants — levels that rose over time in the 1980s and 1990s — strong evidence that releases from reactors were entering human bodies. No such releases will occur after next week.

Despite the potential for a meltdown and the permanence of waste, the only documented entry of Oyster Creek radioactivity into bodies has been the routine environmental releases, which may be a cause of local cancer death rates. In the period just before and after Oyster Creek startup, the Ocean County cancer death rate was 3 percent below the rest of New Jersey. Since then, the country-to-state ratio steadily increased, reaching a high of 10 percent above other New Jersey counties in the past decade. If the county level had remained 3 percent below the state after the early 1970s, nearly 5,000 fewer county residents would have died of cancer.

In the future, less intake of toxic products should reduce cancer risk. A recent medical journal study showed that in the 20 years after the Rancho Seco plant closed, the rate of cancer cases in Sacramento County fell compared to the rest of California — a total of about 4,300 fewer cancers.

There is no need to risk further loss of people to cancer just to produce a small amount of electricity. Replacing nuclear power with safe, renewable and less expensive solar and wind power will improve public health in central New Jersey.

Joseph J. Mangano is executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project.